Real World Descriptions

Jeebox is designed to describe the real world. I built the entire thing by myself... I tried to see what things in English, can't fit into my language, then improve my language to be as good.

It sounds simple but actually its really hard... to do it in a clean way that's not a total mess. It took a few years of work to get it right.

Other people are working on very related things... and they call "discourse representation structures" (DRS) or "ontologies", etc. I really only used their stuff to find holes in my language, and then build my own solutions. So I didn't learn the answers from them, just the problems, and I learnt the answers myself.

Jeebox has a "independant starting point", because I created it from my own analysis of real life, not from blindly copying other people's work.

Meaningfully describing the real world like this has many potential uses...

Unfortunately just giving a sense of how important it is, is hard. I'd have to spend a day or so trying to figure out how to describe it to someone who doesn't understand computers. Either that or you "just get it"... so we'll leave it at that for now :)

Translation is a big one. But really anything involving meaningful interaction with the computer. Once you can accurately describe both the meaning of the words and the sentance structure, you can allow for perfect translation... or just understanding of the sentance.

I might as well list a few things that I will add... to Jeebox... or have added.

Dictionary support

Once you have a good "dictionary" code... and a good dictionary 'word-bank', translating between languages is very easy.

Actually creating the word-bank however is a big job however. It needs many people to create. I've made a few small dictionaries with around 200 words, despite being small it describes complex sentances, like "How can someone fall so far without realising it".

Status: Done. The translation between languages is near perfect.Drawbacks: Its not a solution. Its a proof of concept. Writing large amounts of jeebox syntax, is hard work... compared to writing plain English!

Human friendly input

This would allow for sentances like "2 men ate every fish" to be entered, and Jeebox would look up each word in the dictionary... then try to "Reconstruct" a sensible gramatical structure, for that sentance, and turn it into this "2~men ate every~fish".

This would then allow sentances to be very easily translated! The nice thing about this, is that if "Jeebox converts it wrong"... you can easily fix it.

Status: Half-done. Parsing side of things is done... you can enter the data unstructuredly and Jeebox will parse it. Its not "just a string", it understands full-stops, paragraphs, indentation, styling, and brackets and other structure that humans like.

But the conversion between that "human friendly structure" and the "meaningful Jeebox structure" is not written.

Possible future work?

There are lots of possible future additions to Jeebox to make it even easier to use... but I think it's best I don't talk about it until anything happens.